Embodiments of the present invention provide an Enterprise Service Architecture (“ESA”) platform for a multi-application computer system in which banking processes are allocated across multiple applications.
Most modern firms use computer systems to manage their operations. Banks are no exception. They use computers to perform account management functions, loan origination, loan maintenance and virtually any other business process the bank performs. Thus, their computers not only execute applications to monitor information regarding their accounts, they also define the business processes that bank personnel must perform to perform banking transactions. SAP AG, the assignee of the present invention, currently sells a suite of applications to assist banks in performing these operations.
Various banking operations require access to a variety of applications. Common applications include customer relationship management (“CRM”) applications, accounts management (“AM”) applications, risk and finance management applications. There are others.
Although these applications are quite complex, they typically cover only a small portion of business functionality required by banks. Moreover, they typically provide different interface technologies and protocols for integration purposes. Accordingly, typical installations at each bank required the bank's personnel to become familiar with the applications and manually engage each application individually as the personnel perform operations. That is, to initiate a new loan, for example, a loan officer might have to engage an Accounts Management (“AM”) application to retrieve data regarding an applicant's current accounts. The loan officer further might have to engage a Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) application to generate an internal credit rating for the customer and engage a Consumer & Mortgage Loan (“CML”) application to develop pricing information regarding the new loan. The loan officer traditionally would be compelled to access each application directly to perform some incremental step in the origination process. This required business personnel to be intimately familiar with the IT landscape of its networks.
SAP AG recently has added a platform called “ESA platform for Banks” to its banking solution to facilitate access to its applications. The platform is a central component in which process flows are defined, a sequence of processing steps that are to be completed to perform some business transaction (e.g., loan origination). When progressing through a process flow, the banking backbone places calls to applications that formerly must have been addressed directly by firm personnel. The ESA platform, therefore, relieves firm personnel from becoming knowledgeable about network landscape. Instead, personnel are free to focus on the business processes themselves.
With the integration of an ESA platform into system architecture, the inventors perceived an opportunity to provide increased functionality to the ESA platform. Specifically, the inventors perceived an opportunity to provide centralized process monitoring and system monitoring functionality that previously has not been possible in an enterprise resource planning system.